The American legal system, as well as some other legal systems around the world, relies heavily on written judicial opinions, the written pronouncements of judges, to articulate or interpret the laws governing resolution of disputes. Each judicial opinion is not only important to resolving a particular legal dispute, but also to resolving similar disputes, or cases, in the future. Because of this, judges and lawyers within our legal system are continually researching an ever-expanding body of past opinions, or case law, for the ones most relevant to resolution of new disputes.
To facilitate these searches, companies, such as West Publishing Company of St. Paul, Minn. (doing business as Thomson West), collect and publish the judicial opinions of courts across the United States in both paper and electronic forms. Many of these opinions are published with bibliographic cites or hyperlinks to other opinions, that rely on or criticize various points of law in the opinions. The cites and hyperlinks enable researchers to readily access the related opinions electronically over a computer network, through the Westlaw™ online research system.
Recently, the Westlaw system has been expanded to include appellate briefs and litigation documents. The appellate briefs and litigation documents are linked to related judicial opinions. Thus, researchers using this system can not only identify relevant judicial opinions, but also retrieve and leverage content underlying these opinions.
Although this expansion of content represents an enhancement to the resources available to researchers, the present inventors have identified a functional gap between these resources and their usage in practice.